


Wolves and Leashes

by DeCarabas



Category: Dragon Age: Inquisition
Genre: M/M, Trespasser DLC
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-30
Updated: 2019-09-30
Packaged: 2020-10-27 00:57:17
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,070
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20751683
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DeCarabas/pseuds/DeCarabas
Summary: Maxwell’s started seeing the wolf statues as good signs, each time he comes across one in his travels. Monuments managing to portray faithful companions and a god of rebels and traitors all at once.On rebellions past and present, and wolves, and trust.





	Wolves and Leashes

**Author's Note:**

  * For [ScarletLoup](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ScarletLoup/gifts).

Maxwell’s started seeing the wolf statues as good signs, each time he comes across one in his travels. Monuments managing to portray faithful companions and a god of rebels and traitors all at once.

A god who was able to walk safely among both sides, in the stories, and use that to work towards his own ends, might have had some sympathy for a rebel mage (and they were all rebels in the eyes of the Chantry these days) walking safely through the new heart of the Chantry in all but name, templars and Seekers and the Right and Left Hands of the Divine themselves all looking to him to lead them instead of hunting him down, offering up this impossible chance—for him, for the whole rebellion.

Fen’Harel might approve, even if the Maker wouldn’t.

* * *

He’d heard wolves calling out after the avalanche too. And maybe this had just been a bit of delirium setting in, but in that moment, the calls had felt like guides. Reassuring. Something else was alive out there, trying to survive, as if they were on the same side.

The wolves Solas has painted on the walls of Skyhold’s rotunda catch his gaze on the day when Maxwell gives Solas his phylactery.

“Someone ought to be able to find the Anchor, if we get separated like that again. Or to know what happened to it.” Can’t just have the Anchor disappearing beneath random self-inflicted avalanches, after all.

The phylactery sits on Solas’s desk, glowing red and bright with Maxwell’s proximity, and there’s a crease on Solas’s brow as he sits there and looks at it for a moment that stretches out far too long.

He doesn’t know why he’s kept it, really. A lot of people had gone to a great deal of effort to recover and destroy as many phylacteries as they could during the war—first the massive storage room at the White Spire, then at Cumberland, then others—bit of a waste if he held onto it and let it fall back into templar hands. The sensible thing would have been to smash it as soon as he’d managed to find it.

But then, if he was a sensible person, he probably would have run the opposite direction from the Inquisition and the army of people who think he’s chosen by Andraste to fight a god.

“You could bring this to Seeker Pentaghast,” Solas observes. “Or Cullen.”

“No. Definitely not.”

And the Inquisition doesn’t need a bit of his blood to keep him from here; the phylactery’s a bit superfluous for that when he’s got the Anchor crackling in his palm and the Breach over his head, but. Maybe he couldn’t bring himself to smash the phylactery like he probably should have, but he can’t bring himself to hand it back to the Seeker or the Knight-Captain, either.

“You put a great deal of faith in me,” Solas says. Reluctant. But he picks up the vial.

_You watched me while I slept and kept the mark from killing me,_ he thinks but doesn’t say, an image he hasn’t been able to get out of his head.

Solas’s thumb strokes a small circle on the surface of the glass, and Maxwell shivers.

That night he dreams of Haven as it used to be, and a kiss.

* * *

Solas makes him think of home. Odd that the lifelong apostate should be the one to remind him of the Circle, with so many mages and templars around behind Skyhold’s tall stone walls. But there’s that something he’d felt when he’d first been taken to the Circle, the hope of touching something strange and wonderful and mysterious, that’s there in the way Solas speaks of his journeys. All the wonders of the Fade—and these days Maxwell mostly uses it to lob big rocks at people. 

The first time he’d met Solas, he’d seemed—not subservient quite—harmless. The way he’d smiled, the easy humor. He’d been slouching a bit, and politely deferential, laughingly downplaying his contributions. It’s familiar. Maxwell knows the steps of this dance, played it on the nights he was allowed out of the Circle for Great-Aunt Lucille’s soirees. The role assumed by any mage in public with an unknown quantity: _nothing to fear here, I promise_.

The templars who’d escorted Maxwell to those soirees had been complacent, certain he wouldn’t try to run. They’d been right. But every time, he’d thought about it. About how easy it could have been to slip away from them, to get out, out of the Circle’s reach and out of the city and out of that whole enclosed world—at least up until his phylactery was sent for, and then there’d be no more genteel trips out of the tower for him. Still. That idle fantasy of living like an apostate, that fantasy that Solas has lived.

It seems impossible that anyone could have managed to live in hiding for as long as Solas had, to avoid the templars all that time. Dazzled by the thought.

* * *

The war had not quite been Maxwell’s fantasy of freedom. An apostate’s life in hiding had never really been freedom either, for that matter. And as they sit beside the campfire and as Maxwell tilts his head back to watch the wolf statue guarding their camp, their conversation turns, inevitably, to how to find a way forward—if that’s possible. About what’s past. Solas listens so intently it makes Maxwell feel like between them they might hold the key to the whole mess, if they could just keep talking long enough for him to uncover it.

About trying to do the right thing, whatever that is.

About tearing down the world and watching it burn and living with the fallout, and what responsibility you have to the people of that new world you’ve been trying to create.

“The rebellion was not your decision alone,” Solas says.

But what happens next is—if not his alone, more on him than most.

He looks down at the crackling light of his marked hand, escaping through the fingers of his fist, until Solas touches his hand, turns it, presses his lips to his marked palm.

* * *

He’ll think, later, after everything, of ancient murals of a god of rebellion who took the markings tattooed onto his people’s faces, magical bindings in blood, and of a phylactery sitting on the Dread Wolf’s desk somewhere, untouched.


End file.
